Drought and famine have become so inextricably linked in both popular and academic analyses of Africa's food problems in the 1970s that the relationship between the two is now taken almost axiomatically as cause and effect. The logic is simple and persuasive. Drought produces crop failure and crop failure, just as inevitably, leads to human starvation. This reasoning and the colour photography of starving children in the world press have proved so irresistible that social scientists have had surprisingly little rôle in scholarly discussions of the causes of the recent African famine. The subject has been left almost entirely to climatologists, physical geographers, water experts, and agronomists. Social scientists have so taken it for granted that the causes of African famine are natural and climatic that most of their literature on the subject falls into the genre of‘impact’ studies which omit the issue of causality and deal almost entirely with the social and political after effects.

The world economy is now in intense agony — sharper than ever experienced since the War. The international monetary order, carefully constructed with gold as its lynchpin and fixed exchange rates, is in shambles. Trade patterns laboriously built up since 1945 are facing their biggest challenge. The entire framework of domestic policies constructed on the assumption of steady growth — or only minor recessions — is now being questioned. Expectations of decline in industrial output ranging over io per cent are no longer restricted to whispers at cocktails — they are officially pronounced. Unemployment in the developed countries, some say, could swell nearly anywhere up to io per cent — a level which only a year ago was thought to be impossible. The identification of economic power with international liquidity has been all but destroyed in the wake of the oil price rise. Prices of other primary commodities are falling rapidly.

Those with an interest in developing a predictive theory of social revolution cannot afford to ignore the numerous corpses in what I shall call the Graveyard of Marxist Executives. For many this is a cemetery of aspirations, while in a small number of instances counter-revolutionary terror has occasioned a veritable bloodbath. What makes this study worth-while is that in all cases the right to a decent life for future generations has been aborted. And given the diffusion of nuclear weapons capabilities to many Third-World régimes that cannot cope with the obstacles to development, it is not farfetched to suggest that many of our children's lives too may be forfeited eventually to nuclear pollution or worse! During the interim, increasing numbers of desperate Third-World régimes will endeavour to buy time by challenging the price structure of raw materials. Even if they fail for the most part, the quality of the international human and physical environment will almost certainly deteriorate.

Of all the instances of European conquest, indignant world opinion views the legalised racism of white settlers in South Africa as the worst case. As the last remnant of traditional colonialism, the inevitable doom of the whites is predicted, and only the time span of an outdated racial domination is in question. The main reason for this outcome of a polarising racial confrontation is seen in the intransigence of prejudiced settlers who stubbornly refuse to share their immense privileges with one of the most exploited and oppressed populations in the world. Socialised in a traditional ‘frontier mentality’ of cultural isolation and religiously-sanctioned racial superiority, South African whites are considered typical fascists, who use a vast police force to crush all opposition, and enforce a battery of outrageous laws to ensure a cheap labour force as the basis of their huge profits and accumulated wealth.

The manifold torments of the Third World press themselves upon all of us for solution. Poverty, disease, oppression, early death: this is the fate of most of mankind. Today all the world plucks at the sleeves of the academy, asking, What do you know? What are you good for?1 Any answer must include a statement of the discipline's response to the troubles that beset the less-developed countries. How lawyers respond ought to define the domain of the study of law and development.

The notion of African continental government has run the gauntlet of criticism and ridicule in its day. Not a few African ‘moderate’ or conservative leaders and their agreeable tribe of western scholars have been only too keen to fire broadsides at it from time to time. Thus, Nigeria's Abubakar Balewa saw it as a ‘nightmare’; a union government, he said, ‘might come, so might world government’. To Dennis Austin the pan-African movement – ‘in its fundamentalist-Nkrumaistic sense of a united Africa’ – is ‘plainly chimerical’.1 And Scott Thompson, not to be outdone, saw the whole thing as ‘essentially a mirage’ – the ‘myth of Eden’ – and the endeavour towards it as one of ‘chasing the whirlwind ’.2

If books and articles about the United Nations can hardly compete in sheer volume with the words produced by the Organisation itself; the literature is abundant. A review has therefore to be selective, and in this article attention is concentrated on what has been written about, but not by, the Secretariat in the last decade. The scope is further narrowed by focusing mainly on what has been published about the activities of the U.N. in Africa. Even so the range remains very wide, and no claim is made that all the relevant literature has been assessed.